Alan Riach BA, PhD
Professor of Scottish Literature
- Hugh MacDiarmid
- 20th century Scottish poetry
- Scottish literature, music, painting, film & related arts
- Scottish literature, imperialism & iconography
- Scotland & the Modern Movement
- Canons & margins in Scottish literature
- Contemporary writing, esp. poetry
- Course lecturer and Convenor
- Convener of Board of Examiners, PhD
- Faculty (departmental representative)
- The Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid (General Editor)
- The Edwin Morgan Centre for Creative Writing (member)
- Association for Scottish Literary Studies (co-opted member of Council)
Room 307, 7 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 6144
e-mail: a.riach@scotlit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Publications
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Biography
- On 1st January 2001 Alan Riach returned to Scotland to take up a position as Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.
Alan Riach is a poet and was Associate Professor of English and a Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he specialised in twentieth-century literature, teaching Scottish, Irish, American and post-colonial literatures, and modern poetry.
Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1957, he holds degrees from the Universities of Cambridge, where he studied English as an undergraduate, and Glasgow, where he completed his doctorate in the Department of Scottish Literature. He worked in New Zealand from 1986 to December 2000.
His critical writing has appeared in numerous books and journals in Britain and New Zealand. He is the General Editor of the multi-volume Carcanet Press Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid, including the Selected Poems (New Directions, U.S.A., 1993; Penguin 20th Century Classics, 1994). He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991), The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1999) and the co-editor of The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris (L3: The University of Liège, 1992). He has written and presented Scotland’s Renaissance, a series of programmes for New Zealand radio’s Concert FM (1993), and the ‘Literature’ sections of the 10-part Concert FM radio series Fearful Symmetries: The 20th Century in Retrospect (1999-2000).
His poetry has been published in numerous journals in Scotland, New Zealand and internationally. It is collected in This Folding Map (Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, 1990), An Open Return (Untold Books, New Zealand, 1991), First and Last Songs (Auckland University Press / Chapman, Edinburgh, 1995) and Clearances (Hazard Press, NZ / Scottish Cultural Press, 2001). His radio series The Good of the Arts has been broadcast and repeated on Radio New Zealand’s Concert FM programmes and can be visited at http://www.southwest.org.nz/productions/tgota/
Since 2003, Alan Riach has held a Professorship in Scottish Literature and is currently Head of Department. His most recent critical book is Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and he has contributed poems and essays to numerous recent volumes, including Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (co-edited with Professor Douglas Gifford, Carcanet, 2004), 121 New Zealand Poets (Godwit Press, 2005), Spirits of the Age: Scottish Self-Portraits (ed. Paul Scott, Saltire Society, 2005), The Wallace Muse (ed. Lesley Duncan and Elspeth King, 2005) and The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2005).